XFX’s Speedster MERC 310 model of the AMD RX 7900
It is available for $879.99 (was $929.99) on Newegg in the US and £789.99 (was £899.99) on eBuyer in the UK – as an added bonus, the Newegg deal includes a game bundle containing Unknown 9: Awakening And Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2. While the discounts are much better for PC gamers in the UK for now, we could see more price drops in the near future as AMD ditches high-end GPUs – not to mention that Black Friday is now approaching .
This isn’t the first time the price of AMD’s top-end GPU has dropped significantly in price, as we first saw it dip below $850 earlier this year. This is in direct contrast to Nvidia’s competing flagship GPU (the RTX 4090), which has seen much smaller discounts since its 2022 release – based on Nvidia’s current success, I expect this to continue with the RTX 5000 GPUs series, following the inevitable wave of post-release scalping.
It might be time to give AMD’s GPU a try…
While it’s clear that Nvidia’s RTX 4080 Super and 4090 are more popular options, I’d say you shouldn’t scoff at the RX 7900 XTX. Perhaps the most attractive aspect of Nvidia’s GPUs is DLSS, which compared to AMD’s FSR has slightly weaker image quality when using the upscaling modes.
I don’t think this alone should be a reason to completely ignore the RX 7900 The biggest drawback is ray-tracing performance, which struggles to provide consistent frame rates at higher resolutions – conversely, Nvidia’s GPUs have managed this, at least within the RTX 4000 series.
Fortunately, it offers high-level performance outside of ray-traced games, with consistent frame rates of over 100fps at 4K when using FSR with Fluid Motion Frames (AMD’s additional frame generation and insertion software, which has its own rival in Nvidia’s DLSS Frame Generation).
Even with Nvidia’s RTX 5000 series bound to be unveiled sometime in the near future, it’s likely that prices for both of the brand’s current high-end GPUs will remain unchanged for now – at least until Black Friday. If you’re not too bothered by poor ray-tracing performance and can deal with the weaker performance of FSR compared to DLSS, the RX 7900 XTX is definitely worth a try.